But what about in marketing? There don’t seem to be a lot of “Hashtags for Facebook” guides out there though. Hmm, it doesn’t look like any marketing gurus are giving seminars or webinars on the subject either. What gives?

Are hashtags useful on Facebook, or are they dead?

Before we dive into the discussion, let’s quickly go over what hashtags are and where they came from.

What’s a hashtag?

Originally started on Twitter by Chris Messina, they were a way to filter and sort through the massiveness of messages found on Twitter. Essentially, it was a way to filter discussions in a simple way. Click the hashtag to see all tweets from people on that topic. You could find and follow all sorts of new people this way.

Facebook didn’t need to bother with hashtags because users could control what information to see in their News Feed. Think of it this way: On Twitter, it was an active way to seek out information; on Facebook you got the information passively in your News Feed.

Instagram and other social media platforms embraced the idea of the hashtag because they too were platforms where users had to actively seek out the information and users. Google+ and Facebook rely on their platform rules and algorithms to filter the information for you.

Back to the question….

Are hashtags useful on Facebook?

In a word, no. Wait, what?

It’s true. For the very reason that they ARE useful on platforms like Twitter and Instagram, they’re NOT useful on Facebook.

Think about it this way:

When you go to Facebook, you’re probably looking through your News Feed for news on your friends and family. Even if you’ve Liked a brand on the site, the information still comes to you in your News Feed.

You see all the updates and pictures that have been posted by both friends, family, and brands. And then you log out. Can you think of any time that you continued to surf through various pages? Probably not.

Compare that to your experience on Twitter.

You open the app on your mobile phone or tablet, and scroll through your feed. Someone uses a hashtag for one of your favorite TV shows, so you click on it to see who else is talking about it. Maybe the star of the show? The writer? Director? You then lose the next hour as your scroll through all the updates with that hashtag, and maybe even made a new friend who also likes that show.

And there you have it: The reason why using hashtags on Facebook will never catch on (and in fact, hasn’t caught on in the almost full year that they’ve been available.) The platform itself doesn’t lend itself to the notion and practice of hashtags.

No one spends hours on Facebook scrolling through updates based on a hashtag (spending hours playing Candy Crush Saga or Bejeweled Blitz, sure, but reading through messages? Nope.)

Here’s the science to back it up

EdgeRank did a study on hashtags, analyzing more than 500 Pages that posted both with and without hashtags. After looking at 35,000+ posts, they found only 6,000 had hashtags. That’s only 17% of the posts on Facebook.

When they dug deeper into the numbers, they found that hashtags didn’t have a positive impact on the brand’s engagement levels on Facebook.

Compare that to Twitter, where EdgeRank found that using a hashtag typically doubled the chances of a message being retweeted. More than 70% of the Fortune 500 brands they looked at experienced an increase in retweets when they used a hashtag. Seventy percent!

When CNET reached Facebook for comment on these numbers, they said that their algorithms “are focusing on posts with high-quality content, rather than simply hashtags.”

Tip #3-Hashtags are still affected by Privacy settings

Hashtags work on personal profile posts, fan page posts, group posts, event posts, and all comments.

As with all personal profile features on Facebook, privacy settings prevail.

If you publish a post on your profile to friends only, and the post contains a hashtag, the hashtag will be clickable and open up to display all other posts on Facebook containing that hashtag.

Public posts—with or without hashtags—are public.

But, ONLY friends can see friends-only posts that show up in hashtag searches.

Private (friends-only) posts—with or without hashtags—are just that: private and visible to friends only.

Even when friends include hashtags in comments on your friends-only thread, your post is still private and visible just to your friends.

With hashtags shared in private groups, that clickable hashtag will open to show public posts with that tag (along with any friends’ posts with that tag), but posts from the private group would only show to members.

Individual comments on threads do not surface in hashtag searches; just posts show in searches.

Tip#5-Use hashtags sparingly in each post

Facebook doesn’t limit your posts by character, so you can type away to your heart’s content. Likewise, you can add as many hashtags as you want to a Facebook update. However, it’s not recommended since it’s a red flag to both Facebook and users.

DON’T MISS OUT

Julia Borgini helps Geeks sell their stuff. A self-proclaimed Geek & writer, she works with B2B technology & sports companies, creating helpful content & copy for their lead generation and content marketing programs. Follow her on Twitter @spacebarpress to see what she's writing about now.

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SPEAK YOUR MIND

Very good article by the way! I recently did a little research on this topic and found that hashtags on FB doesn’t work in comparison to IG and Twitter. Their platforms (at it seems) tend to also not reach a lot of people unless you are buying ads. Thanks for this content too!

Excellent blog! Do you have any recommendations for aspiring
writers? I’m planning to start my own blog soon but I’m a little
lost on everything. Would you propose starting with a free platform like WordPress or go for a paid option? There are so many choices out
there that I’m totally overwhelmed .. Any tips? Thanks a lot!

It is definitely great to hear the proof behind not over hashtagging. I will have to get better at researching the correct hashtag to use. Well maybe two. Want to see how well they work in all social networks.

As a “newbie” to Twitter and Facebook, it seemed easier to use hashtags in Twitter. Posts are very short and with the volume, hashtags made it easier to find what you wanted. On Facebook, it just doesn’t seem “natural” to use them, nor does it accomplish anything. Perhaps it’s just me???